In them we see the losing victory of invention over the imagination that works with given facts.

No doubt in the Moral Plays there is more exercise of intellect as well as of ingenuity; for they consist of metaphysical facts turned into individual existences by personification, and their relations then dramatized by allegory.

But their poetry is greatly inferior both in character and execution to that of the Miracles.

They have a religious tendency, as everything moral must have, and sometimes they go even farther, as in one, for instance, called _The Castle of Perseverance_, in which we have all the cardinal virtues and all the cardinal sins contending for the possession of _Humanum Genus_, the _Human Race_ being presented as a new-born child, who grows old and dies in the course of the play; but it was a great stride in art when human nature and human history began again to be exemplified after a simple human fashion, in the story, that is, of real men and women, instead of by allegorical personifications of the analysed and abstracted constituents of them.

Allegory has her place, and a lofty one, in literature; but when her plants cover the garden and run to seed, Allegory herself is ashamed of her children: the loveliest among them are despised for the general obtrusiveness of the family.